I mean that the mechanism for allowing or barring font lock apparently
can't be part of the font lock subsystem. It appears as though it will
need to be outside the font-lock system in order to _gate_ the font lock
system.

It appears as though people may be erroneously conflating font-lock
modes with syntactic meaning of the underlying text and keying off
font-lock values rather than the syntactic meanings. This leads to the
erroneous programmer impression that font-lock is a necessary
prerequisite for their code, so they force it on.

Perhaps this is just an iteration of the "better lock, better lockpick,
better lock, better lockpick" escalation cycle. Perhaps there's another
way to solve this problem without resorting to an escalation. But as
emacs is currently regressing, (can't use major modes that used to be
available), it appears as though we are in dire need of a quick fix
before emacs regresses to a point of complete inutility.

Either that, or we need to back off some recent changes and return to
the code that worked.